We are writing not as detached commentators but as those who were in the streets of Chicago in the summer of 1968 — as anti-war activists, as witnesses to state violence, as people who believed then, as we do now, that resisting the illegitimate use of force on the American people is our essential democratic duty.
Fifty-seven years ago this August, we were among the tens of thousands of nonviolent anti-war demonstrators gathered around the Democratic National Convention. We were there when Mayor Richard J. Daley declared “law and order” and unleashed his crackdown on free speech.
What occurred on Chicago’s streets — especially along Michigan Avenue, in Grant Park, around the Conrad Hilton Hotel and in Lincoln Park — was emblematic not only of the deep fissures in America over the Vietnam War but of the willingness of a police state, which included the National Guard, to silence dissent in America. Radio and TV captured images of a government turning on us: clubbing, corralling, gassing protesters, dragging many of us into patrol wagons.
In the aftermath of the protests, friends of ours, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seals, and one of this op-ed’s authors, Lee Weiner, — “the Chicago Eight” and later “the Chicago Seven” — were charged with conspiring to use interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot. While some were at first convicted, ultimately those convictions were reversed on appeal.
We do not state this lightly: What is unfolding before our eyes today in Chicago and in cities all across America, is not merely an echo of the government’s outrageous behavior in Chicago in 1968, it is a terrifying escalation.
Flouting the Constitution, President Donald Trump has declared war on the very people he was elected to serve. The Trump administration, weaponizing the Department of Homeland Security against ordinary Americans, is occupying Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Chicago and Portland, deploying military tactics to stifle free speech, staging performative raids under the pretext of pursuing dangerous criminals, and subverting democratic norms without accountability.
What began seemingly as a putative crackdown on so-called “criminal” immigrants, the “worst of the worst,” has revealed itself to be exactly what it is: a brazen attempt to instill fear in and demand obedience of all Americans.
Consider the recent predawn raid in this city. With theatrical flourish, federal forces rappelled from helicopters upon a building in South Shore, allegedly to target members of the Venezuelan gang “Tren de Aragua.” But instead they targeted and terrorized the entire building of immigrant and Black residents using flashbangs and pointed rifles. With no warrants, agents broke down doors, zip-tied children and held residents for hours with no explanation and no access to counsel.
Also consider the outrageous treatment of peaceful demonstrators outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Broadview. Protesters have been arrested there for exercising their right to free speech, and federal agents have aimed so-called “less-than-lethals” at them and members of the clergy.
All across this country, the action of agents of the federal government at Trump’s direction demonstrates all too clearly that what the Trump administration really wants to achieve by sending troops to American cities is intimidation.
We don’t mean to wax nostalgic about what happened in Chicago in 1968. But we know two things to be true: One, officials chose to fuel a false narrative that protesters, not the government, incited violence that summer. And two, historians agree that the anti-war movement was effective in bringing about an end to the war in Vietnam.
Today, Trump and government officials like Stephen Miller advance a convenient portrait of American protesters as “domestic terrorists.” This is a lie. Nonviolent protest is our superpower.
We call on the American public to take to the streets in Chicago and in all American cities, in nonviolent protest on Saturday Oct. 18 for No Kings Day.
Organize. Resist. And attend a No Kings Day event. The future of our democracy never depended on it more than now.
Judy Gumbo is the author of several books, including “Yippie Girl, Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI.”
Frank Joyce is a member, National Council of Elders.
Nancy Kurshan is the author of the upcoming book “Levitating the Pentagon & Other Uplifting Stories.”
Abe Peck is the author of “Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press.”
Don Rose is a writer and political consultant.
Lee Weiner is an author and member of “the Chicago Seven.”